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| Is The Thirty-Nine Steps one of your favorite films? |
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Yes. Pretty much. What I liked about Thirty-Nine Steps were the sudden switches and the jumping from one situation to another with such rapidity. Donat leaping out of the window of the police station with half of a handcuff on, and immediately walking into a Salvation Army Band, darting down an alley-way and into a room. "Thank God you've come, Mr. So-and-so," they say, and put him onto a platform. A girl comes along with two men, takes him in a car to the police station, but not really to the police station--they are two spies. You know, the rapidity of the switches, that's the great thing about it. If I did The Thirty-Nine Steps again, I would stick to that formula, but it really takes a lot of work. You have to use one idea after another, and with such rapidity. |
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| Secret Agent (1936) |
I liked The Secret Agent quite a bit. I'm sorry it wasn't more of a success, but I believe it was unsuccessful because it was the story of a man who did not want to do something. He was sent out to kill a German spy and was given a killer to do it and he botched it the first time--killed the wrong man. You can't root for a hero who doesn't want to be a hero. So it's a negative thing. I think that's why it didn't really succeed. |
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Sabotage (1936)
Sabotage had a grimmer aspect than most of the other British films. Is this because of the bomb incident? |
Oh, that was a big error. I made a cardinal error there in terms of suspense. The bomb should never have gone off. If you build an audience up to that point, the explosion becomes strangely anti-climactic. You work the audience up to such a degree that they need the relief. The critics were very angry. One woman said, "I could hit you." I found everybody protesting against it. Now the boy had to be killed for the sake of the story. One should have done the killing a different way, off the screen or something. I shouldn't have made a suspense thing of it.
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| Young and Innocent (1937) |
When you are dealing with melodrama, you mustn't let the characters take themselves where they want to go. They must come where you want to go. So it's really an inverted process. It is a bastard form of story-telling. You lay out your story and you put the characters in afterwards. That's why you don't get really good characterizations. There isn't time, and in any case, you know, they may not want to go.
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The Lady Vanishes (1938)
The Lady Vanishes is one of your least complex films. Do you agree? |
It is a very light film. Of course, it doesn't make sense. Why didn't they send the message by carrier pigeon? The story is inspired by that legend of an Englishwoman who went with her daughter to the Palace Hotel in Paris in the 1880's, at the time of the Great Exposition. The woman was taken sick and they sent the girl across Paris to get some medicine, in a horse-vehicle, so it took about four hours, and when she came back she asked, "How's my mother?" "What mother?" "My mother. She's here, she's in her room. Room 22." They go up there. Different room, different wallpaper, everything. And the payoff of the whole story is, so the legend goes, that the woman had Bubonic plague and they daren't let anybody know she died, otherwise all of Paris would have emptied. That was the original situation and pictures like Lady Vanishes were all variations on it.
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Jamaica Inn (1939)
How did you come to make Jamaica Inn?
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I was talked into it. After I'd signed with Selznick, I had time to make another picture. When I saw what this was going to be, I tried to get out, but I'd already taken money from them so I couldn't. The root problem was that there was no mystery. This is the story of the parson who preaches in the pulpit; and the mystery of who is the wrecker, the man who puts a light on the rocks, causing ships to approach the rocks and be wrecked so they could be looted. Of course, the parson turns out to be the wrecker. And in Jamaica Inn, you have Charles Laughton playing the parson. Who's the wrecker? Who's the wrecker? What are you going to do--have a little bit-player turn out to be the central figure? Doesn't make sense. It's very difficult to make a who-done-it. You see, this was like doing a who-done-it and making Charles Laughton the butler.
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| Rebecca (1940)
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Rebecca was a Bront• thing really, a romantic Victorian novel in modern dress. In a sense you could get annoyed with the Joan Fontaine character because she never stood up for herself, she let Mrs. Danvers override her. But after all that's applying a modern point of view to what I say is a Victorian heroine.
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| Wasn't Rebecca the first film in which you experimented with a tracking camera as opposed to the use of montage? |
Pretty well, yes. But only because we were going around a big house. I don't think it was really right, because after all, the eye must look at the character. It must not be conscious of a camera dollying unless you are dollying or zooming in for a particular purpose.
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| Foreign Correspondent (1940) |
I had offered Gary Cooper the Joel McCrea part in Foreign Correspondent. I had a terrible job casting the thriller-suspense films in America, because over here this kind of story was looked on as second-rate. In England, they're part of the literature, and I had no trouble casting Donat or anybody else there. Here I ran into it all the time--until Gary--who's really English. Afterward, Cooper said, "Well, I should have done that, shouldn't I?" Of course I don't think it was Cooper himself, I think the people around him advised him against it.
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| How did you get the idea of the windmill sequence? |
When I am given a locale--and this is very important in my mind--it's got to be used, and used dramatically. We're in Holland. What have they got in Holland? Windmills? Tulips? If the picture had been in color, I would have worked in the shot I've always wanted to do and never have yet. The murder in a tulip field. Two figures. The assassin--say it's Jack-the-Ripper--comes up behind the girl. The shadow creeps up on her, she turns, screams. Immediately we pan down to the struggling feet, in the tulip bed. We dolly the camera in to one of the flowers, sounds of the struggle heard in the background. We go right to one petal--it fills the screen--and, splash! a drop of red blood comes over the petal. And that would be the end of the murder.
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| Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941) |
This picture I made as a gesture to Carole Lombard. She asked me to do it. The script was already written, and I just came in and did it. She had heard my remark, "Actors are cattle," so when I arrived on the set, I found a little corral with some cattle in it. She had arranged that.
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